Journal of International Business Studies最新文献

The global mobility of people has transformed how multinational enterprises (MNEs) manage and benefit from multiple locations. We examine the changing locational boundedness of human capital with globalization and how this has impacted the competitiveness of MNEs. The growing use of quasi-internalization through the active reliance on global value chains and outsourcing has altered the way MNEs spatially organize their activities to optimize their access to human capital, a key source of ownership advantages. We identify areas for further research, including new strategies for managing human resources using these new forms of cross-border governance. Collectively, the papers in this special issue provide insights into how MNEs can leverage the movement and reorganization of their human capital to enhance their unique capabilities and succeed in international business.

The literature on expatriation typically assumes that cultural and institutional familiarity facilitates expatriate adjustment. This assumption underplays the role of the historical context, especially the influence of painful colonial pasts that often lie beneath such familiarity. In addition, seeking to capture expatriate adjustment as a single measure, such literature does not engage with the differences in the extent to which expatriates achieve cognitive, behavioral, and affective adjustment. Using a qualitative study addressing the work experiences of Brazilians living in Portugal, we argue that to fully understand expatriate adjustment, we must pay attention to the historical colonial relationship between the expatriate’s home and host country. Specifically, we discuss the importance of social representations of history for how expatriates narrate, interpret, and act in response to their experiences. Our research makes two theoretical contributions. First, we explain how historical colonial relationships affect expatriate adjustment and how this leads to adjustment only being partial. Second, we develop a nuanced understanding of expatriate adjustment by drawing attention to its three interdependent dimensions (cognitive, behavioral, and affective), showing that an expatriate may be well adjusted in one dimension but less adjusted in another. We call for organizations to engage more, and more critically, with history.

Recognizing the dearth of attention afforded to global cities in the international business and management journals, Goerzen et al. (J Int Bus Stud 44(5):427–450, 2013) chanced their hand at becoming pioneers. Their gamble paid off. Taking geographic scale down to the city level, questioning why multinationals choose to locate subsidiaries inside or outside of global cities, they jump-started their own conversation, sugaring the pill with the IB staple—liability of foreignness. So well was their inquiry crafted and executed that their insights into the way global connectedness attracts investment into these cities remains instructive. Since then, global cities and firms have undergone a transition. We visualize increasingly multifaceted cities interacting with firms accelerating towards adopting an “ecosystem approach”—characterized by extensive non-equity collaborations and partnerships. We explain why investigation à la Goerzen et al. (J Int Bus Stud 44(5):427–450, 2013) today must grasp multinationals’ diverse relationships to revivify theoretical insights from economic geography for a world of tensions heightened by geopolitics, but above all grappling with the sustainability agenda. We conclude that within an ecosystem of feedback effects, multinationals’ agency can be part of the solution. To deliver, IB must harness emerging novel geographic—“big”—data and techniques to match, in the spirit of the imaginative fusion a decade earlier.

While there is substantial literature on global mobility, roles in the global integration of multinationals are not limited to internationally mobile staff. We focus on ‘globalizing actors’, defined as those within multinationals who are involved in global norm-making. Using interview-based qualitative data, we categorize individuals’ involvement in global norm-making according to the function within norm formation in which they are involved, their source of influence, and their geographical and organizational reach. We identify nine distinct types of globalizing actors. We demonstrate that many individuals play important roles in global norm-making without having formal hierarchical authority or being globally mobile. Our approach draws attention to the ways in which many globalizing actors use ‘social skill’ to further their aims. Our categorization of such ‘forgotten globalizing actors’ facilitates future research by allowing a fuller understanding of the ways in which individuals across multinationals contribute to global integration.

The crucial role and fragility of global supply chains highlight the need for deeper insights into the factors that can promote the establishment of global supply chain relations. We examine the impact of financial statement comparability on firms’ establishment of global supply chain relations. Using a large sample of supply chain relations from 49 non-U.S. economies over the period 2003–2020, we find that non-U.S. firms are more likely to establish and maintain more supply chain relations with U.S. firms when their financial statements are more comparable to industry peers in the U.S. To address endogeneity concerns, we show that our findings are robust to identification strategies exploring the exogenous changes in financial statement comparability associated with IFRS adoption or PCAOB international inspections. Moreover, we find that the effect of financial statement comparability on cross-border supply chain relations is more pronounced when the information barrier is higher between non-U.S. economies and the U.S. Overall, our study provides new insights into the impact of financial statement comparability on firms’ establishment of cross-border supply chain relations and sheds lights on the role of financial statement comparability in promoting international trade.

Living up to the expectations of the JIBS Decade Award, Goerzen, Asmussen, and Nielsen’s 2013 paper not only introduced the literature on global cities to the international business (IB) community but continues to be generative. In their “Retrospective and a Looking Forward” paper 10 years later, the authors highlight megatrends about people, places and things, and new contexts and alternative perspectives, and they encourage further new ways of thinking about global cities and IB. This commentary expands upon their framework of three overlapping circles of global issues, global organizations, and global locations, by drawing especially from recent experiences in the U.S. and research in economic geography and allied fields. Facing global issues of climate change, human rights, health, housing, and the impacts of digital technologies on work, cities offer prospects of responding to these challenges, a context for multinational enterprises (MNEs) to consider. Against the backdrop of large-scale global migrations of unskilled, mostly contract, workers to global cities in developed economies, recruitment agencies and advocacy groups for migrants are global organizations as important as MNEs. Finally, the fluidity of physical boundaries, as illustrated by city-regions, world regions beyond traditional Western-centric perspectives, and intra-national variations, is key to analyzing global locations.

Abstract

Goerzen et al. (J Int Bus Stud 44:427–450, 2013) became influential because it generated a broader view of the international business (IB) domain. The paper broke new ground by going beyond the country and regional levels to analyze MNE location choices, a novel approach that revealed the importance of global cities. The original argument suggested that global connectedness, cosmopolitanism, and advanced producer services mitigated the liability of foreignness, thereby highlighting the complexity of MNE location decisions. It also drew attention to the need for IB research to take a more nuanced view of MNE behavior. Developments since 2013, however, have rendered a very different world. Our goal in this commentary, therefore, is to challenge the IB community to think more deeply about the future of global cities specifically and about IB more generally. We do this by re-evaluating the role of cities as micro-locations against the emergence of megatrends that are shaping our future, including demographic shift and an increase in social awareness, the changing natural environment and an increase in sustainability concerns, and the rise in capability and application of digital technologies. We conclude by suggesting that IB research must connect more deeply with interdisciplinary theories and methodologies to produce generative IB research.

Studies on multi-stakeholder processes and cross-sector partnerships have demonstrated that multiple stakeholders across different sectors can resolve sustainable development issues when they combine their complementary resources and capacities. These studies have highlighted the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs), considering their requisite resources and capacities to implement intervention strategies. However, MNEs’ role remains largely underexplored in the context of non-state cultural regions where state governance is entirely lacking. Drawing on the findings of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Golden Triangle region near Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos borders, this study investigates how multiple stakeholders’ collective interventions transformed the illicit drug-based economy of the region into an alternative sustainable economy. The region once supplied 60% of the illicit drugs distributed worldwide, yet a series of cross-sector interventions transformed the region into a sustainable economy over the past 60 years. The findings show that the foreign subsidiaries of MNEs proactively explored the unknown region and shared knowledge with other actors, which helped participating stakeholders effectively address regional sustainable development issues. The resulting process model sheds light on MNEs’ central roles at various stages of the multi-stakeholder process, offering new insights into informal institutions and intercultural studies in the field of international business.